Lesson 16: Webmail, IM, Chat, VoIP, Presence

In this lesson, as well as finishing off a few Pecha Kucha presentations outstanding from last time, we'll also dive into the world of online communication — and increasingly inter-related, criss-cross pattern of talk, email, chat and status updates.

1)  Finish remaining Pecha Kucha presentations. What makes a good presentation?

2)  For prep, you created a Gmail email address and explored the interface, settings and functions. In particular, we asked you to think about Sending, Receiving, Organising and Navigating and we'll spend a bit of time on feedback from that.

3)  How do you choose to communicate when not face-to-face? Have your views changed since we asked this question at the start of last term?

     Let's quickly review some of the communication channels (other than straight SMS) that we're using today:

Email-as-in-Outlook.  (Rules for clear email: judge your audience; name your subject; be clear in your original email and in your response; think about sorting and filing.) Dealing with spam: manual elimination; filters; temporary email addresses (eg, spambox.us).  If you have time, you can find out how Google handles it, Spam, time, and you: An educational video from Gmail … which brings us to.

Email-as-in-webmail — offers much more than standard email.  In a new tab, have a look now at slides 1–3 in this summary (and keep this tab open: you'll need this presentation again this lesson).  All of that is possible from within Gmail:

Top 10 little-known Gmail features (Part 1)

Top 10 little-known Gmail features (Part 2)

5 little-known Gmail features you may not yet know about

Webmail is also morphing into social networking.  In Gmail's case, Google is experimenting with making your contacts your friends: you can read more about this here, or look at your Google Reader and the appearance there of your Gmail contacts as friends:

 

 

More evidence of how things like email and social software and RSS are melding into one integrated medium for varied forms of communication. In your Google Reader, have a look some time at 'Manage friends'.

IM — once, this was seen as "just" MSN (etc — substitute another popular network).  MSN is still hugely popular, of course, but now we also have tools which allow us to chat … and talk … and more (and MSN has changed, accordingly, too).  In Google's case, you need to look at …

GTalk (about page) — another tool that integrates with Gmail. Take a look at slide 4 here.  A new way of chatting and linking with friends is Pownce — popular with quite a few students at SPS. Unlike GTalk, Pownce doesn't (yet) offer VoIP. If you're looking for an alternative to GTalk for VoIP, try Skype. You can find out more about VoIP in Wikipedia.

Lastly, presence. Presence can be as simple as an indication that you're on- or off-line; free to chat or busy (or having lunch or watching a film or …).  Presence can also be like Facebook status updates — a short, quick way to update your friends as to what's going on in your life. Unlike chat, it doesn't require (or even expect) a reply. A sophisticated mobile-plus-web based form of presence is Jaiku (currently invitation only — since Google acquired it; see slide 5 in the presentation you still have open, or go here): it combines presence, mobile-interface and aggregator (think RSS).A simpler and hugely popular (worldwide and here at SPS) alternative is Twitter.

Prep: Use GTalk in the browser, the desktop client and the GTalk gadget (see this video). GTalk has good online help: start here.  In pairs and groups within the set, experiment with: chatting, voicemail, talk, file-sharing; group chat; emoticons; YouTube sharing; offline messaging; adding the GTalk gadget to your iGoogle homepage.